#TheEverydaySpruce | DIY tea towel wall art

#TheEverydaySpruce
– a collaborative project by lapinblu & growing spaces –
| SIMPLIFY | CLARIFY | BEAUTIFY |

Apologies that The Everyday Spruce has taken a longer break than Sarah-Lou and I originally intended. Real life has taken over (as it has a habit of doing!), and while that happens, our blogs understandably take a back seat. But suddenly we’re well into June and we’re both keen to get it up and running again – it has already given me some fantastic ideas and focus this year, and I love the prompt to think in a different way and to look for small changes I can make at home or in my life that will make me feel happier and calmer.

We always wanted to develop the community aspect of The Everyday Spruce – sharing our ideas and getting inspiration from others is something that I think is at the heart of why Sarah-Lou and I blog. Some of you have written brilliant blog posts, or have shared your tips on Instagram and we’ve loved seeing how different you all interpret The Everyday Spruce. We’d really like to open the collaboration up further, and gather a team of like-minded people who would like to get involved and publish an Everyday Spruce post each month, so if you’d like to join us please leave me a comment below or drop one of us an email, and we’ll go from there.

I’ve done a simple DIY to get me back into The Everyday Spruce groove. Six years ago, when I was preparing the twins’ nursery, I used tea towels to create artwork for the walls. It was an inexpensive alternative to large canvases etc, and allowed me to create wall art with plenty of impact. Now the twins have moved into their own bedrooms, it was time to update the artwork on their walls, and so I’ve revisited this easy DIY. The scope of choice when it comes to tea towel design is brilliant – there are so many fantastic designs available to choose from. I found this one by Boodle Boutique on Etsy. It combines Ez’s love of woodland animals with her current obsession with cycling so it was a perfect choice for her.

Turning the tea towel into a piece of wall art is really easy, as you can see from the directions below.

Directions:
1. Gather your kit – you’ll need a staple gun (and staples), a wooden frame (you can make your own to the dimensions of your tea towel, or you could use a cheap blank canvas from a craft store) and your chosen tea towel. Give your tea towel a really good iron to get rid of all creases.
2. Lie the tea towel face down on a flat surface, and position your frame on top of it so that the image on the front is central. Wrap the tea towel around and over the side and staple onto the back of the frame. Continue all the way along one long edge (staple every 5-10cm). Once one long edge is done, pull the fabric taut across the frame and secure the other long edge. You want to make sure the fabric is pulled as tightly as possible so that it won’t sag on the frame.
3. To do the bottom and top edges, fold the corners as if you were wrapping a present, pull up over the frame and staple in place then carry along the edge, stapling as you did for the long edges.
4. Turn the frame over and check the fabric is taut, and that you can’t see any loose fabric flapping at the sides (if you can’t just secure in place with another staple at the back).

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